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Henry Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews English Studies ISSN: 0013-838X (Print) 1744-4217 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/nest20 Sham Marriages and Proper Plots: Henry Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews Anaclara Castro-Santana To cite this article: Anaclara Castro-Santana (2015) Sham Marriages and Proper Plots: Henry Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews , English Studies, 96:6, 636-653, DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2015.1045728 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2015.1045728 Published online: 16 Jun 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 572 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=nest20 Download by: [Ankara Universitesi] Date: 20 August 2017, At: 08:33 English Studies, 2015 Vol. 96, No. 6, 636–653, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2015.1045728 Sham Marriages and Proper Plots: Henry Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews Anaclara Castro-Santana This essay explores Henry Fielding’s development of the marriage plot in Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Surveying theatrical echoes in these works, which are particularly apparent in their marriage plots, I make the case that Fielding’s first two novels are clearly indebted to his former career as a dramatist in the London stage of the late 1720s and early 1730s. I argue that, in writing Shamela and Joseph Andrews, Fielding was responding to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in a way that corresponded to how his plays were reactions to other popular theatrical entertainments of his time. This complicates the conventional critical view that it was Richardson’s first novel, with its outstanding popularity, which drove Fielding to propose a radically opposite model for fiction writing. Four years after the Licensing Act of 1737 deprived Henry Fielding, the leading English playwright of his time, of his livelihood—which had led him to pursue a career in the law, as well as some ventures in journalism—he returned to the spotlight of contro- versy with his publication of An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (2 April 1741).1 This hilarious epistolary narrative of a fraudulently virtuous servant Downloaded by [Ankara Universitesi] at 08:33 20 August 2017 maid who tricks her employer into marriage by manipulating his lust is famous as the first retaliation in print to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (7 November 1740). More specifically, Fielding’s parody was a response to the second edition of Pamela (14 February 1741) with Richardson’s augmented prefatory encomia, which included a letter by Aaron Hill recommending the book as “the Soul of Religion”.2 Anaclara Castro-Santana is affiliated with the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, UK. ORCID : http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0985-3849. Email: [email protected] 1For a thorough exploration of Fielding’s theatrical career see Hume and Rivero. For a detailed biographical account see Battestin and Battestin. 2Richardson, Appendix I, “To the Editor of Pamela”, 506. © 2015 Taylor & Francis Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews 637 That Richardson’s blatant self-promotion, along with the public craze for the novel, provoked Fielding’s antipathy is standard critical opinion.3 The conventional story follows that, enraged by the way influential writers and even clergymen advocated Pamela as a major source of moral instruction, the former playwright responded first with a direct parody in Shamela, and then with an alternative version of fiction writing in Joseph Andrews, where the title character is facetiously introduced as the brother of Richardson’s heroine. While these are all valid points, far too much atten- tion has been devoted to studying Fielding’s early prose fiction in relation to Richard- son’s. This tends to obscure the fact that Shamela and Joseph Andrews were written by an already famous author who, for the past several years, had been earning his keep by satirizing his rivals and parodying their works. Many of Fielding’s plays, moreover, were marriage comedies orbiting around convoluted courtships and troublesome married lives, to a certain extent like Pamela, and very much like Shamela and Joseph Andrews. This essay, therefore, makes the case that Fielding’s first two novels responded to Richardson’s Pamela in a similar way as his plays were reactions to other popular theatrical entertainments of his time. This complicates the ostensibly parodic relationship between Pamela and Shamela, and provides novel insights about the structure and themes of Fielding’s second work of prose fiction.4 The Pamela Phenomenon, or the New “Pleasure of the Town” The unprecedented popularity of Richardson’s first novel, which modern critics have variously labelled as a “media event”,5 a “craze”,6 a “vogue”7 and a “controversy”,8 was an extraordinary cultural phenomenon that doubtlessly had an impact on Fielding, a writer always attentive to current events, and usually at the forefront of literary gossip. His Shamela was the first in a long list of prose adaptations, poems, plays, illustrations and translations, variously attacking and commending Pamela. Other notable examples that followed Fielding’s Shamela include Pamela Censured (25 April 1741), a fan representing scenes from Pamela (advertised on 28 April), John Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (28 May), Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (16 June), James Parry’s True Anti-Pamela (27 June), George Bennett’s Pamela Versified (24 Downloaded by [Ankara Universitesi] at 08:33 20 August 2017 July), the first authorized French translation (23 October), Henry Giffard’s Pamela, A Comedy (first performed on 9 November), Charles Povey’s The Virgin in Eden (23 3For useful discussions of Fielding’s response to the second edition of Pamela see Keymer and Sabor, The Pamela Controversy, xxxix; Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace,31–2. 4It has sometimes being suggested that Jonathan Wild (published in Miscellanies 1743) was in fact Fielding’s first attempt at prose fiction writing, which he chose not to publish until the Walpole regime was effectively over. See Battestin and Battestin, 280–2; McKeon, 383. The Wesleyan editors of Fielding’s Miscellanies, however, persua- sively refute this hypothesis. See Goldgar, xxxii–xxxviii. 5Warner, chapter five, “The Pamela Media Event”, 176–230. 6Ingrassia, 7. 7Eaves and Kimpbel, Chapter VII, “The Pamela Vogue and Pamela Part II”, 119–54; Gooding, 109–30. 8Keymer and Sabor, The Pamela Controversy. 638 A. Castro-Santana November), Richardson’s own sequel Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (7 December) and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (22 February 1742). The Pamela rage did not abate quickly. As Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor note, by 1750 “Pamela was everywhere and still selling”, and as late as the 1790s, the Pamela debate was still alive in France in the aftermath of the Revolution, with stage adaptations that played on the ambiguity of a text that could be invoked both for the subversion and preservation of class hierarchies.9 As a writer who had recently experienced the devastating effects of censorship on the stage, Fielding must have been outraged that a novel like Pamela—which had several potentially erotic passages—could be deemed so worthy of encomium, while plays had to be verbally and situationally tame to be judged fit for performance.10 That a morally objectionable novel written by an uneducated printer should receive such lavish praise must have seemed to Fielding a proof of the decadence of the cultural standards of modern society. This, however, was not an isolated example of popular acclaim for works that did not conform to the author’s standards of artistic merit. From Fielding’s perspective, the widespread acclaim for Richardson’s novel was probably comparable to the craze of theatrical audiences for the pantomimes of John Rich—which he par- odied in plays such as Tumble Down Dick (1736)—or the much-admired Italian operas he mocked in The Welsh Opera (1731), Eurydice; or the Devil Henpecked (1736) and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737). At a personal level, moreover, the storyline of Pamela was particularly irksome to Fielding at that time, since a month earlier his prodigal father had married one of his servants, which rendered the whole family an object of mockery for malicious scan- dalmongers.11 His sneers at the foolish Squire Booby in Shamela may have been motiv- ated, at least to an extent, by his father’s latest indiscretion. It is hardly surprising, then, that Fielding felt the need to state his objections to Pamela in print. On the other hand, given that the theatre was no longer an option for a playwright of scandalous repu- tation like himself, pragmatic as he was, and in serious financial trouble, the commer- cial success of Pamela offered a convenient venture upon which Fielding could capitalize.12 This he did by means of parody. Fielding’s involvement in the Pamela controversy, however, was not an isolated Downloaded by [Ankara Universitesi] at 08:33 20 August 2017 event. I believe it is virtually analogous to his participation in what has been described as “the theatrical renaissance of the 1730s”.13 As Peter Lewis, Robert Hume and Albert Rivero point out, the perceived stagnation of the early eighteenth-century London stage, contrasted with the unprecedented popularity of operas, musical numbers 9Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, 49 and 210–11. 10For a detailed account of censorial practices on the London stage in the aftermath of the Licensing Act of 1737 see Kinservik, esp. chapter 3. 11On this episode of Fielding’s life see Battestin and Battestin, 300–1. 12According to Fielding’s biographers, he wrote Shamela from a sponging house where he was confined for a fort- night while settling a suit for debt.
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